


The New Czerny

by telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: He argues a lot with Ronan, M/M, Noah kills Whelk in self-defense, POV Second Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ronan and Adam also prank call Distressed Noah, Whelk is part of Gangsey, Whelk's a ghost now, manipulative boyfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:15:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6534835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are no landmarks in time. There’s pre-Glendower and post-Glendower and you can’t wait until you’re on the other side of that favour. “You’re close, Gansey, you’re close, you’re so close. Just push through. Keep giving it your all. For me. I died for you, remember?”</p>
<p>(AU where Noah killed Whelk in self-defense; Whelk is a ghost who dates Gansey and uses him to get Glendower's favour)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Czerny

**Author's Note:**

> SO apparently this is the first Gansey/Whelk fic ?????????????????? I am both honoured and mortified lmao
> 
> kudos the lovely [kiiouex](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) who beta'd this fic~~~

You’re sure it’s Czerny’s fault, somehow. You’re absolutely certain that if he hadn’t decided to grow a backbone, if he had just crumpled to the leaf-littered floor and _stayed there_ , like he was supposed to, then everything would’ve turned out fine. The ley line would’ve woken, Cabeswater’s soil would’ve glutted itself on the blood of your sacrifice, and you would’ve walked out of that place with power more immeasurable than the zeros that used to sit comfortably in your bank balance. You would’ve returned home, endowed with power so fearsome that your sudden plummet into poverty wouldn’t have touched you.

But no— _Czerny_ decided that he didn’t love you enough, in the end. After _all_ those times he wouldn’t stop banging on about how much he loved you – you’re still not convinced, to this day, that ‘love’ was the word he meant; something akin to ‘worship’ would’ve suited his infatuation a lot better – he didn’t want to do this for you. At least twice in your lives that you know of, that you were paying attention to, you heard him confess that he would die for you. And you knew that he meant it; he always had that faraway-eyed look about him, and he got short of breath, like his heart had leaped up to clog his windpipe. He said he’d _die_ for you. How was it any different when _you_ were the one to kill him?

You wish he were still around so you could tell him that it was his own damn fault. If he didn’t really want you to use him as a sacrifice then maybe he shouldn’t have given explicit verbal consent several times over.

_Stop being such an asshole,_ you admonish yourself, and then you admonish yourself again, because you sound just like Gansey. You spend far, far too much time with him; his mannerisms are rubbing off on you. You don’t think they suit you.

 

You’re bored. You are so, so, so bored. You’re dimly aware that apparitions don’t _have to_ be bored, but you always need something new to complain about. Time is a cycle and time is an illusion of corporeal perception anyway, but you deign to check the clock on the wall and whine to see that it’s only eleven o’clock. You wish it were three-thirty already, so Gansey could abandon all the frivolity and tripe of school and get back to more important things. Waking the ley line, the hunt for Glendower, getting that favour.

You already know that he’s going to use the favour on you. You’re in his head, and you know he’s lumbering under the weight of his grief and guilt over having essentially stolen your life; it sloshes messily from the shoulder pole, seeping into almost every conversation you have with him. Not only that, but you’ve _seen it—_ you’ve seen him wake Glendower, and humbly bow, and dearly ask for your life, once the sheer wonder of the moment has let up enough that he can speak. He has tears in his eyes. He loves you, like Czerny loved you, and he wants to press the whole world into your hands if it’ll make you happy.

You stare at him now, from where you sit on the windowsill at the very back of the classroom. He seems distracted. He’s facing the front, back straight, a pen ready in his hand, but he seems about as present as Ronan, who has his head on the desk and his eyes closed and an earbud snaking under his sweater. You look into Gansey’s head, because if there’s one worthwhile thing about dying and coming back as Casper the friendly fucking ghost, it’s that you can have a nosy into people’s thoughts.

As soon as you dip a toe in, you regret it. He’s thinking about you. He thinks about your too-large features on your too-small face, mistakes you for handsome, overestimates the number of times you smile and underestimates the intensity of your scowls. He thinks about last night, when he was starting to take sleep like a brick to the head for the first time in _weeks,_ and you urged him to stay up an extra hour to read the new piece of literature you’d found that briefly touched upon the royal cohorts of Welsh Kings in the 1400s. He thinks about when his eyes glued shut and his resolve dried up, and how your kiss brought him at least seventy percent back to consciousness.

At some point, your own memories become muddied with his. “For me,” you’d cooed, and kissed him again, because kissing boys is the easiest thing in the world, and you’d let him hold your cold, dead hand as he’d read on with the fierce kind of determination you know ought to be rewarded with another kiss. But he didn’t collect it at the end; when he’d finally crossed the final passage, he just passed out with the book still open. You had patted him a good job.

You feel him slip up; there’s a brief moment of exhausted weakness where he gives in to the taste of you – you don’t taste like anything anymore; you’re _dead_ – and the smell of you – again, he’s just imaging things – and he daydreams unbuttoning you out of your school shirt – _he can’t do that_ – and running his fingertips over your bare chest in a way that makes you quiver—

“Gross,” you sneer, and drop down from the windowsill. Students shiver at a cold breeze they think is from the window as you soundlessly cross the classroom. You throw a look at Gansey over your shoulder as you head for the door and see that he’s just as embarrassed for himself as you are for him. His cheeks are tinged pink. He he presses his knees together in tell-tale way that’s very obvious to you but discreet to everyone else, and you snort derisively. You wonder, not for the first time, if you were the only private-school boy who didn’t like dick.

You don’t know where exactly it is you go to pass the time, while you wait for the living to catch up to you, for something noteworthy to happen. An empty, white void maybe? A basement cinema with a blank screen? You don’t know, and you don’t care, and it’s not important; all that matters is that when you come to, school is over and Gansey has taken his Camaro out on the road, on his way to Cabeswater. It takes a just-noticeable moment for your existence to line back up with everyone else’s, and knowledge you shouldn’t have rushes in to fill the blanks. You hear your name, but it could’ve been one second ago or one hour ago. All you know is that the tone of it wasn’t particularly _nice_ , so you arrive in a bad mood.

You try to sit in Gansey’s passenger side, but it’s already occupied with a warm sack of bones and blood, and your bad mood worsens.

You materialise next to Adam in the back seat when no one is watching. “Stop talking shit about me, Lynch; I’m right here.”

Adam starts, puts a hand over his heart like you could’ve been the one to do him in. Gansey flashes you a pleasant smile in the rear-view mirror and Ronan swivels around in his seat – _your seat –_ to stare at you. “You think I only talk shit about you when you’re not here? Let me dispel that myth, right here, right now: Whelk is a fucking self-important _prick_ who thinks that everyone should be nice to him just because he’s dead.”

“I was _murdered_ by my _best friend,_ you _asshole_ ,” you yell, but Ronan just makes a dismissive noise, and Adam turns to look out the other window. Only Gansey’s eyelids seem to drop forlornly, now; everyone else is immune to it. You’ve wrung as much sympathy out of them as you can. “How the fuck would _you_ feel if your best friend killed you?”

“I’d wonder if there was good reason to it,” Ronan says, facing forward. One of his hands closes around the roof handle. He puts one foot up on the dash and, on cue, Gansey bats it back down. “Maybe your bestie just got sick of your bullshit.”

“Ronan,” Gansey rebukes but Ronan barely reacts.

Gansey’s eyes find you in the rear-view but you don’t react either. Your eyes have glazed over. You’re thinking about Czerny; you’re picturing the nightmarish look on his bloodied face when he finally wrestled the skateboard from your hands. Your head snaps in real-time at the first blow, the wallowing, terrified screams filling your ears as you kept grabbing for him, when everything— _everything_ dormant exploded to the surface, all or nothing, do or die.

You can’t believe he’s still out there, still alive, still getting out of bed everyday with the memory of bludgeoning his best friend to death in self-defence. You feel sick.

“Pull over,” you gasp, and Gansey, wild-eyed, complies in an instant. You already know you can’t ruin the upholstery but you know from experience that the fresh air helps and prying, worried eyes _don’t._

The car stops and you throw open your door, stagger into the long grass and dry-retch until the memories of your last moments pass. They feel less and less like memories every time. You feel like you’re there, again, slowly bleeding out, the world blacking out, the pain in your cracked head a jarring song, singing you out, Czerny crying over you, because he doesn’t have the guts to just keep beating you and mercifully end your suffering. At least you would’ve done that for him.

You flinch at a hand on your back, and as soon as you can place it – _Adam Parrish_ – the current world rushes back in and the past plinks out. You take deep breaths you don’t need – habit, mostly – and pitch unevenly back to your feet. “You okay?” Adam asks, about as concerned for you as a burning casserole, and you nod, wipe your chin on your sleeve. You’re still shaking. You don’t look, but you can hear in the distance Gansey arguing with Ronan. Part of you relishes how flawlessly disturbed your performance was and you latch onto it: _that’ll fucking teach you to make fun of me, Lynch. Gansey’s putting you outside tonight._

You follow Adam back into the Camaro, where Gansey and Ronan have slammed their respective doors – Ronan slammed his first and Gansey did his darnedest to one-up him – and you read the atmosphere like it may as well have the word TENSE written all over it. Gansey doesn’t immediately start the car and you don’t have to dip into anyone’s head to know why.

Not looking at you, Ronan resentfully snaps, “ _Sorry,_ Whelk,” clearly only because Gansey told him to.

“Fuck you, Lynch,” you return, and Ronan throws up his arms and fixes Gansey with a _You see what good that fucking did?_ expression.

Gansey ignores him in favour of you, and that’s when you like him best. “Whelk?” he asks, tender eyes on you. “Are you alright?”

You wave them all off irritably. “Christ, I’m _fine._ We’re wasting sunlight; just keep driving.”

Gansey doesn’t need to be told twice. He takes you all back onto the road and dares to drive a little over the speed limit to make up for lost time, just for you.

 

As far as romantic overtures that don’t physically pain and sicken you go, Gansey’s a lot better at it than Czerny ever was. All Czerny ever had for you was unthinking devotion and an eternally blank schedule, with a few mixtapes thrown in – you only ever played one, for a laugh, and there was far too much pop-punk on it for your liking. Gansey, though, he surprises you. He called the police on your battered, rotted body, and he attended your pitifully cheap imitation of a funeral. When the ley stuttered out for a while there and you were just _gone_ , nowhere, he had the clever though somewhat morbid idea to dig up your bones and re-bury them on the ley line proper, in an old crumbling church. It had been a nice gesture. You’d rewarded him suitably.

You hadn’t meant to make him fall in love with you. You don’t know if it’s a strange, imperceptible power you hold over gay boys, or if you’re just unfortunate queer bait or what. All you’d meant to do was convince him that you were worth Glendower’s impossible favour, and your little advances had worked well— _too_ well. Now he’s actually planning a life with you. He thinks that, once he wakes Glendower and asks for your life back, for the smudge to be permanently wiped from your pale, sunken cheek, you’ll stay. Maybe if you can’t ask for your life _and_ your family fortunes, you’ll marry him and kill him. Take all his money and carefully remove his name from it all. The poor love-blind idiot; he wouldn’t even see it coming. Much like Czerny—

Your body crumples in on itself in a hard wince. _Czerny_. You press a hand to your cheek. _Czerny_. You feel achingly empty, horrid and monstrous and six thousand feet under. _Czerny, Czerny, Czerny, Czerny, Czerny—_

Gansey’s voice cuts through the memory – “Whelk?” – and you look up. He’s right where you left him, and you’re right where you left yourself, too. Side by side, sat on his bed, a pile of Glendower-related texts and a laptop between you, mint leaves and snacks for him, Latin prose for you. He stares at you like he can’t quite work you out. You think, _Good, because you never will._

Your shoulders drop as you force the tension to roll out of them. You try to look cool, unaffected. “What?”

Gansey shakes his head lightly. The bags under his eyes make him look bruised, make him look as bad as Adam. “Do you think about it a lot?” he asks, voice small, and your body draws up in a defensive breath. “About what happened to you?”

You hold it for another moment. Then you let your corpse breath out. “Yeah. I mean, it’s not intentional. It’s… intrusive.” Gansey nods, listening. You think he’s waiting for you to say more, so you do. “I just can’t believe Czerny actually did it. He wasn’t the type, you know? If I threw a stick, he’d fetch it for me and ask if I wanted it back. ‘No’ I’d say. ‘If I throw shit away then I clearly don’t want it back, do I?’” You shake your head, make a scornful noise. “But… he was _nice_ , you know? And loyal. He _liked_ me. I just can’t…”

Your head drops and you scrub a hand over your face. Your wretched tiredness stretches out for all eternity yet you can’t _sleep_. Probably a good thing you don’t, though; the nightmares would haunt you, would keep you up all night anyway, you’re sure of it. But still.

Gansey lays a hand on your knee but you take no notice of it.

“And it was such a _waste,_ too, right? He killed me and he _still_ didn’t wake the ley line. Fucking idiot. He had no idea what he was doing.”

Gansey’s thumb has started to rub into the groove of your kneecap, small and comforting. You take no notice of that either.

You keep complaining about Czerny, because it’s been seven years and you still haven’t finished complaining about Czerny. “With his own damn skateboard. He didn’t even finish me off! He just left me there, in the sun. He watched me suffer. Then he just fucked off and pretended not to know anything about it! _Fucking_ coward. He didn’t even stick around town long enough to let me haunt him, and make his walls ooze blood and eye-jelly or whatever.”

Gansey’s hand stills on your knee. “Do you know where he is now?”

You shrug. “Not on the line, that’s for sure. Last I heard, he moved to D.C. with his family.”

Gansey doesn’t reply. You look at him; he’s fallen strangely, pensively quiet on you, his eyes unfocused. You skip the middle-man that is verbal communication and dip into the swallow waters of his mind to see what’s thinking. Your eyes bulge when you catch the gist of it.

“Wait, really?” You feel your mouth spread into a vicious smile, one that even Ronan himself would find impressive. “You think we should kill him?”

“What? No, no.” Gansey shoos that particular notion away instantly and you try not to feel too underwhelmed by him. “But maybe we could… intimidate him, somehow.”

“Just put the cops on his back and that’ll be enough; he’ll crack under the pressure like he always fucking does. He’ll be charged for suspicious behaviour if nothing else.”

“Maybe we should talk to him,” Gansey suggests, and something in your incorporeal stomach _drops._ Czerny’s a sheep, and a moron, and susceptible to carefully crafted and cultivated manipulation, but you highly doubt that a couple of teenagers he’s never met will manage to successfully convince him that he’s murdered in anything other than self-defence. Czerny doesn’t have cold blood.

You grab Gansey’s shoulder and shake him; you’re that cold, he shivers from the contact. “Are you _insane?_ There’s no reasoning with a madman like that. What if he tries to kill you, too? What if he lies and says that he never did it—tries to pin the blame on _me_ somehow?”

You stare at Gansey, frantic and frustrated. You need to dissuade him. You need to. You know you can kiss that favour and the promise of life itself goodbye if he ever finds out that you lied to him. That you’re no less a murderer than Czerny. You didn’t _succeed,_ no, but in another universe you did. You _know_ you did, because you fought tooth and nail, to the death, and you knew once Czerny grew some balls and smacked you with his skateboard—

You flinch suddenly, at the blow, at nothing, and Gansey flinches, too. It’s like waking from a nightmare you slipped into when you were still conscious, and you’re sick of it. Your head falls into your hands. You feel upset and unstable, and Gansey does his best to put his arms around what parts of you are still there. _Czerny. Czerny, I’m sorry. You had to kill me because I definitely would’ve killed you._

“I’m sorry,” Gansey murmurs mournfully, and you do little to stifle the sob that’s ripped out of you. Gansey clutches you dearer. He reeks of mint. “Whelk, I’m sorry. Let’s stop talking about it. Let’s have a break. Do something fun.”

Your fists tremble as they wind in Gansey’s shirt because _no—_ there’s no _time_ for breaks, for _fun_. He needs to wake the line and find Glendower and ask for that favour _soon,_ or else there won’t be anything left of you to revive. Every year you can feel yourself slip from this plain of existence a little bit more and you feel each and every aching inch of it. Absence isn’t bliss and it isn’t release; it fucking _hurts._

Of course, you can’t say all this, because you’re bawling like a fucking child. You’re utterly embarrassing.

Gansey doesn’t care. He radiates bottomless affection as he lets you half-disappear, lets you awkwardly cling and claw at him, a confused attempt to sap his energy and simultaneously push him off. He doesn’t know what you want but he tries to calm you down; he holds you around your middle and presses unwanted little kisses to the side of your head that you try to lean away from. You can’t take this. You can’t take any of it. You can’t stop seeing Czerny in him.

“I’m going,” you croak, and his sorrow is like having a carpet pulled out from underneath you.

“Come back soon,” he pleads, seconds too late.

 

You try to keep it moderately professional. You’ve already achieved the task of making Gansey sympathetic to your cause, so you don’t need to stick around long enough for him to expect anything more from you than the occasional kiss and a tolerant embrace. You accompany them on excursions to supernatural hot-spots, to meetings at Nino’s where they exchange research, and you only grace Gansey with your presence late at night, when he’s clearly thinking about succumbing to sleep before he’s finished with the new books you’ve dumped on his desk.

“You’re close,” you keep telling him, even though you have no idea. He could be on the cusp of a breakthrough or he could still be weeks away from it; time gets messy when there’s so much of little importance going on. There are no landmarks, as it were, in time. There’s pre-Glendower and post-Glendower and you can’t wait until you’re on the other side of that favour. “You’re close, you’re close, you’re _so close._ Just push through. Keep giving it your all. For me. I died for you, remember?”

You’d invoke more Jesus Christ imagery, but you don’t think it’s necessary.

 

For all that you’re partially clairvoyant and omnipresent, Gansey continues to surprise you. You’ll admit it was a little charming, once, but now it’s just another hidden roadblock.

_“Whelk!”_ you hear him call as he power-walks over to you and Adam in Nino’s, and you turn your head just in time to watch him flash a smile and wave a sheaf of papers at you, like they could pertain to your particular interests. But your interests include _finding Glendower_ and _staying an intact ghost until Glendower is found,_ and you already know that neither of those things are on his mind.

You turn back to Adam and try to resume your very bored conversation about Ancient Greece but Gansey flies into the booth, next to you, and messily sprawls some papers across the table. Adam shifts his water out of the way and Ronan appears out of nowhere – presumably several paces behind Gansey – to sit beside him. He looks about as bored with life as you and Adam do, but, _thankfully_ , Gansey has enough enthusiasm for you all.

“Whelk,” he says, eyes gleaming, and you raise a careful eyebrow at him. Something about his stare is not only giving you permission to look into his head but actually _asking_ you to. You find it hard to care. “Ask me what I’ve spent the afternoon researching.”

Ronan suggests, “How to marry a township?” and Adam weakly scoffs in the way that comes from a joke being unfunny.

“It had better have been ley lines and dead kings,” you say, and then he picks out a sheet of paper with a printed no-colour picture of a man in his twenties.

He pushes it forward and taps it twice. “Noah. Czerny.”

The breath catches in your throat. You look back at the picture and, upon further scrutiny, it’s not just a man in his twenties. It’s _Noah fucking Czerny._

“Fucking _Christ_ ,” you exclaim and snatch up the paper, bringing it closer, but there’s only so much about him the limited dpi can reveal. His face changed in that expected way faces do when they hit their early twenties; his jaw is sharper, his neck is thicker, his face is longer. He still has the same albino look to him with his impossibly fair hair and fair skin, and those oversized and fretful eyes haven’t changed at all since high school. If anything, they carry a lot more weight in them than before. They’re not just scared—they’re _tired._ They’re exhausted, woefully betrayed.

It feels a little good to know that you’ve been haunting him for the past seven years without even trying.

“Fucking Christ,” you utter again, breathless, because there’s just nothing else to _say._

“Lemme see.” Ronan snatches the picture away and stares for a moment before scoffing. “ _This_ is Czerny? Fuck. You know, after the way you described him, Whelk, I was kind of expecting cloven feet, horns—?”

You snatch it back. You look up at Gansey, who beams back at you hopefully, and demand, “What does he _do?”_

“He’s an accountant. Ah, not a very good one.”

“Figures,” you murmur. “He wasn’t good at accounting. He wasn’t good at anything.”

Gansey encourages you to have a look through the rest of the papers and you do, taking your time, soaking in all the latest life developments of this bastard that _he_ got to experience and you didn’t. Adam curiously leafs through the papers that are too text-heavy for you.

Gansey continues, “He lives in D.C., as you said, Whelk. His whole family’s there, too. He graduated from the George Washington University at twenty-two with a bachelor’s degree. He just turned twenty-four, last month.”

“You’re twenty- _four?”_ Ronan cries, and you throw an irked look at him. “Christ, you’re old.”

“So what’s the plan then?” Adam asks, brandishing the paper that holds his address and cell number. Adam says “Blackmail?” at the same time as Ronan says “Prank calls”, but Gansey only seems interested in your answer.

You stare back, still stunned, still unable to fathom how Czerny could really just pick up and continue his life after what you almost did to him, after what he did to _you._ You know why Gansey collected all this information for you but you don’t know what he wants you to do with it. “…I told you we can’t talk to him,” you say quickly, just in case Gansey had misremembered _that_ conversation, though you don’t think he has. You think he’s hoping you’ll change your mind. “Look—we should just forget about all this, yeah? Let’s just leave it alone.”

“Hmm,” Adam hums, thoughtful, politely disagreeing, nose still buried in Czerny’s personal details. “You know, if my best friend killed me and got away with it, I’d at least want to make his life miserable.” He glances up, shrugs. “Not many people get that opportunity.”

“Whatever, Parrish,” you sigh. “This isn’t like—a privilege thing, okay? I’m not obligated to torment my murderer from beyond the grave just because no one else can do it. Lynch.” He looks up at you, attention spread between papers and his phone, and you click your fingers at him to stop, like a dog, which he hates. “I can see you’re taking down his number and I’m telling you now: _don’t_ fucking call him.”

“Oh come on, man. I’m really good at prank calls.”

“I don’t care.” You snatch the papers back from his hands, then Adam’s hands, and you bunch them all up into a neat little pile that you push back towards Gansey: the only person you can trust them with. You fix Gansey with a disappointed look and he glances away, embarrassed to have wasted both your time. “Don’t call him, don’t harass him, don’t do anything. Just do me a favour and forget the name ‘Noah fucking Czerny’.”

“His middle name is Maurice,” Adam corrects and you shoot him a withering look, right before they collectively blink and you’re gone.

 

You don’t know what the fuck happened. You don’t want to name names and point fingers but, ever since Gansey decided to pass up important Glendower research in favour of snooping into Czerny’s life, things have become uncertain. You’re worried, _very_ worried. The future’s been shaken and it’s murky now. New paths have stretched out like branches, pooling into different conclusions, too many to see. All sorts of new, indistinct possibilities have opened up, and now the outcome that you’re _alive_ is about as likely as the outcome of you remaining an apparition, rotting to complete and total extinction, until there’s nothing left of you for the ley line to host. You can’t keep track of it. You don’t know what this means. You don’t know what the _fuck_ is going on.

It’s all you can do to tell Gansey to fucking hurry it up with the Glendower hunt.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, probably not sorry at all. It’s somewhere around two in the morning – time is an illusion of corporeal perception – and Gansey is slumped over his desk, on top of an open .pdf book that you made him shell out over two hundred British pounds to purchase. His eyes are already closed to the burning white of the laptop screen. “I have a… a test… I should’ve…”

“What?” you snap at him, and he jumps, but he doesn’t _wake._ He doesn’t even stir. You wonder if it would be short of sleep deprivation torture if you were to force him to stay with you; you _would_ read his thoughts, but it’s hard to parse the mind of someone who keeps slip-trip-falling into topics that have little to no relevance. “What fucking test? You didn’t mention any test.”

“It’s, um…” He so desperately tries to stay with you, even when he’s long gone. “It’s… sushi night.”

_“Sushi night?”_

He dips into sleep and yanks out again. “What? Hah, no, not… hm. Test tomorrow.”

“Fucking hell. You _lazy_ —”

You lash out at the leg of his chair; he jolts and hits a button on his laptop that closes the .pdf and, a few seconds later, the laptop powers down. Gansey settles a little more comfortably – as comfortably as one can be in a chair and desk – and you fall onto the floor by his feet, curled up and beside yourself with fear of the unknown. Your nails worry at your bottom lip. Your wet eyes stare at nothing, seeing Czerny standing over you, wiping a mix of tears and snot and blood on his sleeve, crying inconsolably, breathing hoarse, “ _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Whelk, I’m so sorry,_ ” like he means it with all his heart.

The future shifts on you again and all you see is black, black, black.

And then the ley line blinks out, like a power outage.

 

You don’t come back. Of course, you’re still _around,_ but the ley line doesn’t grant you enough energy to make yourself seen or heard. It’s not an unusual occurrence, though it’s still annoying; the ley is about as reliable as the weather. It stutters, and when it does, you stutter with it. You can make contact with people, if you try. If you push pot plants and books off Gansey’s desk, it’s hard to blame it on the wind. If you stand next to Ronan and scream in his ear about how much of a trashy, filthy cocksucker he is, you’ll sometimes illicit a shiver or two. Sometimes he puts on his leather jacket, sometimes he turns and asks the others if anyone else felt the room’s temperature suddenly drop ten degrees. The worst is when he realises you’re _there_ but just not able to stop him.

No, you lie—the absolute worst is when he _knows_ you can’t stop him and decides to do something you don’t approve of.

You know what he’s doing. He thinks he’s having a harmless joke, just winding you up for a laugh, and you’re not there to tell him that he’s not nearly as funny as he thinks he is. You’re torn between fetching Gansey, to waste all your efforts getting his attention so _he_ can make Ronan stop, and observing Ronan to make sure that he doesn’t say anything stupid.

_“Don’t fucking call him!”_ you shout, close and loud enough to blow Ronan’s ear out, but he barely winces. He already has Czerny’s cell number on his phone and he’s already dialled. You may as well be screaming at a brick wall. _“I fucking mean it, Lynch! You fucking asshole!”_

You try to kick him, with all your might, but your foot phases right through and you stumble to the floor.

Ronan makes a quick signal for silence at Adam – you shout, _“Adam, you too?”_ – before he says into the phone, low and husky, “Come to Henrietta in the next forty-eight hours if you want an ass-kicking,” and hangs up. Ronan loses his shit while Adam politely laughs, and then Adam puts out a hand.

“I’ve got one,” he says, and Ronan, intrigued, drops his phone into Adam’s open palm. Adam redials the number, presses it to his ear. When the call connects he deadpans, “There’s blood on your hands,” before smoothly ending the call.

_“That’s not funny!”_ you yell at the same that Ronan cries, _“Holy shit, Parrish!”,_ but Adam only hears his praise. You watch on, infuriated, as both Ronan and Adam double-over with laughter, and you cry out, “ _About fucking time!”_ when Gansey finally returns from the kitchen/bathroom/laundry to see if they’re okay.

“You’re both very loud—what’s going on?” They’re still unable to speak, let alone breathe, and Gansey takes in their streaming eyes, the phone still clutched in Adam’s hand. He works it out before they can tell him and you’re viciously happy to see that he’s _appalled._ “Tell me you haven’t been calling Czerny. Whelk told you not to.”

“Yeah, but,” Ronan gasps, coming down from his high, wiping away tears, “he’s not here to stop us, though, is he?”

Gansey makes a noise akin to a growl and Adam says, “It was just a couple of prank calls, Gansey. It’s harmless.”

“ _My_ call was harmless, Parrish; yours was a psychologically targeted attack,” Ronan laughs, shoving him, and Adam shoves him back, though he looks a little pleased Ronan could think him so diabolical.

But Gansey isn’t pleased. You are _savagely_ happy. “Whelk made it very clear that he didn’t want you doing this.”

“Oh come _on,_ Gansey,” Ronan moans. “The guy got away with fucking _murder;_ it’s not like he deserves better. I’m surprised _you_ ,” he points rudely, “of all people don’t want to bring Whelk’s killer to justice. I thought you liked him.”

“Yes, that’s why I _respect his wishes,_ ” Gansey snaps back.

“Maybe he’s just afraid,” Adam says, and you’re instantly buzzing with the need to kick him, because you’re not _afraid_ of Czerny. “You’ve seen his episodes, his panic attacks. He probably just doesn’t want to talk to or see Czerny; it would be too much for him. But if we were to talk to Czerny instead, on his behalf…”

“No,” you utter, aloud but inaudible, because you can feel their persuasion start to beat away at Gansey’s unshakeable resolve. What a bunch of great fucking friends you have. _“No.”_

“Just one more call,” Ronan says.

“You really think he’ll pick up after the first two prank calls?”

“He’ll pick up,” Adam assures. “We made it clear that we know what he did.”

Gansey sighs and runs a hand through his unkempt hair. He shakes his head, uncertain, lost. He murmurs, “I wish Whelk were here…”

“Yeah, we all know you miss your dead boyfriend.” Ronan takes the phone from Adam and chucks it over to Gansey; he doesn’t notice it hurtling towards him and almost drops it. “Call him. Tell him that we know about Whelk. Ask him why his sacrifice failed to wake the ley line.”

“He won’t know _shit,_ ” you snarl.

Gansey hesitates. But, after a few more seconds, his resolve to follow your orders is gone.

You duck out of Gansey’s head, disgusted by him. Heaping on the regret doesn’t make his mutinous actions any more forgivable. “Fuck you,” you spit at him as he calls the number anyway, and he shivers like he actually heard it.

You stay near, close to Gansey’s head, because you have to. You have to carefully monitor all exchange of information. You wish for a miracle, though you don’t see one on the radar; everything has become so, so murky. You don’t know what will be said and you’re afraid you won’t know until it’s too late to cut it off.

Maybe, if necessary, you can reach inside the cell and crush its innards. Anything to steer them clear of the revelation that _you_ were the one to strike first.

You hear the phone connect after a long number of rings.

You hear Czerny’s voice – only a little deeper with age – on the other end, and your heart sags in your chest. Your eyes burn like they want to leak. _“Please, leave me alone,”_ he says in a small, pleading voice.

For a long moment, Gansey can’t process that he’s on the phone to your murderer, your ex-best friend, your possible ex-boyfriend. It takes him another long moment to climb over that hurdle; his posture shifts and his mood lifts and his mind backbenches all emotion that would make the conversation too difficult to proceed. “Is this Noah Czerny?” he inquires, like a bright telemarketer.

It throws Czerny off, too. After all these years, his nervous stutter never went away. _“Y-yes?”_

Gansey smiles thinly at nothing. “This is Richard Gansey. I’m a junior student of Aglionby Academy, just like you and Barrington Whelk were.”

There’s a harsh, ragged noise on Czerny’s end, and it baffles Gansey, but you know exactly what that is. Mere minutes passed between the prank calls and this one, but you don’t doubt that while the others were laughing, Czerny was crying his little heart out. You almost feel sorry for him. You wish you felt nothing but raw, uncomplicated hatred.

“We know the circumstances of Whelk’s death,” Gansey goes on to say, calmly, like he were selling a product but not playing up the incredible discounts _too_ much. “We know that you tried to wake the ley line with him as your sacrifice.”

Czerny’s crying now, indisputably. It’s been seven years, but those pathetic sobs bring back memories so intense they threaten to pull you out of the here and now. _Focus,_ you tell yourself. _You can’t fucking leave now._

You know you have to end this, somehow, so you try. You channel all of your spiritual energy into your hand. Your fingers twitch, taut with sheer willpower, your entire existence narrowed down to this one little hand that you hate to say is your last hope. You push it at the phone, and the phone nudges, like it’s reacting to your touch, but with a little more pressure you lose focus and phase through.

It dawns on you like the inevitability of death that you’re not able to end this call.

You feel trapped inside a glass box, slowly filling with water, looking out.

Gansey holds out the phone for the other two to hear Czerny’s cries, and the mood shifts accordingly, becomes a lot heavier. He returns it to his ear, no more sympathetic than before. “Czerny? You still there?”

_“Please,”_ he wails, and you can’t listen to this—you put your hands over your ears and shake your head miserably. He sounds like he did when he killed you. You feel like you’re dying. _“Please, don’t-! D-don’t call the cops on me, I’ve tried to-to-”_

You press down on your ears a little harder, but everything still seeps in.

“Why did you do it, Czerny?” Gansey asks. “Your _best friend_. What did he ever do to you?”

_“I h-had to do it!”_

_Go, just go, just go, just leave, don’t listen—_

“You didn’t have to do anything,” Gansey rebukes. “You didn’t have to kill him.”

_“He was going to kill me!”_

“…What?”

You’re mercilessly ripped from the present, catapulted back into the past, or future, you don’t know – does it even matter?

You open your eyes, remove your hands from your head, look around. Your shoes crush a mix of fresh and sodden leaf-litter and the smell reaches your nose, earthy and moist. Dense thickets surround you, cooling trees loom over you; you tip your head back and little glints of afternoon sunlight filter in through the canopy – little stars that twinkle with every eerie rush of wind. You feel unnaturally calm. There’s a feeling of awe and magic to the air. There’s a gaping hole in your chest that the shock of your family’s lost riches have blown out just hours earlier. Your heart was plated in gold and the repo men took that, too. You have nothing left.

Czerny lays a hand on your shoulder, as if an affectionate touch could placate you. He presses his nose and lips to the side of your neck, murmurs your name into your skin.

You eye the skateboard hanging loosely from his hand.

_“He was going to kill me!”_

You look up at Czerny’s face, startled, your confusion a brief respite from the cosmic-scale of your loss. It was clearly his voice yet his mouth hadn’t moved.

_Oh,_ you think. You really fucking hate being a ghost. Time skips all over the place like a broken tape.

_“He grabbed my skateboard and he-he hit me over the head, out of nowhere! He was going to kill me, to—you know—to, wake the ley line or whatever, with a sacrifice.”_

You wonder if it would make a difference at all. If you’re just doomed to relive the past, over and over again, or if there’s a way out. If you could be cognizant enough to split off from the pre-destined path and make a new timeline, a more informed one, with the aid of your ‘lived’ experience. If you could foresee the moment where Czerny clobbers you and turn it all back on him instead. If you could take back the snap decision to kill him in the first place, because you already know that it’ll accomplish nothing, that you’ll only succeed in killing a boy who only ever loved you.

_“I took back the skateboard but he just—he kept coming back at me! He was devastated after his family lost all their money; h-he just snapped and tried to kill me! I… I’m sorry, I had to—I had to hit him to keep him away from me.”_

You can’t see a future where you’re alive anymore. You can’t see him, wherever in time he is, but you already know that Gansey is busy unravelling all your lies, feeling as used and betrayed as Czerny probably felt, too. It doesn’t matter what you’ll try to say or do; Gansey isn’t giving you that favour anymore. He’s going to let you decay, slow and softly excruciating.

You want to remind him just how far he’s come in the Glendower hunt with you there to help. _You_ let him build upon your past research, _you_ lead him to an arsenal of ancient texts and introduced him to the _internet,_ and _you_ told him which spots in Henrietta the ley pulsed loudest. The selfish prick. You _literally died so that he could live, and this is how he repays you?_

_“I freaked out—the longer I waited to tell the police, the worse I knew it was going to look. My best friend had just turned on me! I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to kill him, but I didn’t want to die!”_

“Sorry, Czerny,” you murmur, resigned to death, to failure, to everything else. “Sorry.”

The ley line cuts out; everything turns black.

 

It’s another couple of days before the ley line stabilises, and another before you’re ready to face Gansey. You’ve just been following him, between Monmouth and school and the backroads of Henrietta, gingerly prying into his mind, hearing him recall the conversation with Czerny, watching him visualise you delivering the first blow upon a poor, unsuspecting, snivelling boy. You think he’s not so in love with you anymore. Each time he thinks of your face, you become a little uglier.

You finally appear to him at Monmouth, when Ronan’s asleep and Adam’s at work. The place is quiet, musky, dark. He feels an unnaturally cool breeze, looks up to see you standing in front of him. And then he looks back down again, as if he thinks finishing the roof of his papier mâché church is more important than you. Your heart wallows somewhere in your feet.

“Hey,” you say, and he doesn’t say it back. You wonder if crying will gain you much sympathy, but you doubt it. “Look,” you start, but that’s all you have. He levels a stern look at you that screams _Liar._ You try to think. “I… I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t entirely truthful about the circumstances of my death. But, I mean, I still _died._ I still… I still _suffered,_ you know? That still means something, right?”

He continues his work soundlessly; he wets more torn shreds of newspaper in a pot of homemade glue and sticks it over the cardboard. “Did you have every intention of killing Czerny?” he asks, his voice odd and distant. Removed. “Were you really going to sacrifice your best friend just to wake the line?”

“Well if you say it like that, you make me sound like an asshole,” you say, but the look he flashes you is far from amused. You run a hand over the back of your neck. “It—it was _fucked up,_ okay? I’m not denying that. I was in a _really_ fucking bad place. I didn’t know what to do. It’s not like it was premeditated; it’s not like I bought Czerny to the Home Depot with me as I bought all the essential instruments of murder! Cut me some slack here, Dick.”

“No,” he says, and his throat sounds raspy, like he’s about to cry. You really hope he doesn’t. You would feel like an absolute monster if Gansey cried because of you. “You weren’t as big of an asshole as you could’ve been, I know that. It doesn’t detract from the fact that you _were_ an asshole—and you still are.”

“Gansey,” you sigh, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hear it. “Gansey, I’m not _like that._ ”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re like,” he murmurs, and you feel a chill run over your spine. “You lied to me. Just so you could get that favour.” He breaks into a horrid, forced kind of wet laugh. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted from me, isn’t it? That favour.”

“That’s not true,” you defend lamely. You don’t have much else left now; you throw all your last cards on the table. “I… I do love you, you know.”

“Bullshit,” he croaks, and your heart splits in two.

Gansey never swears.

“…Okay, so, I don’t love you, but I _do_ _care about you,_ ” you yell. You open out your arms and let them smack to your sides. “Fine then. Keep your favour, don’t use it on me. Don’t throw me away, though, Gansey. You and Parrish and Lynch—you three are all that I have left.”

“Yeah, well,” Gansey murmurs, not looking at you. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken us for granted. How do we know you won’t try to hit us with our skateboards, too?”

“Gansey, I _wouldn’t,_ ” you cry. “I told you; it was just a stupid impulse. You _know me_ better than that.”

Gansey doesn’t respond. Tears drip down his tired face but he does little to wipe them away. “Please just leave,” he says.

You shake your head. “No.” You sit on the end of his bed, cross your arms. You watch his shoulders draw up and quiver. “I’m not fucking going anywhere. This’ll pass. You’ll take me back.”

Gansey shoots out from his chair so fast that it clutters backwards to the floor and you jump, _hard_. “ _Get_ _out!”_ he yells, voice cracking, and points a vicious, shaking finger at the exit. Tears stream down his face. Sobs threaten to bubble up from between his clenched teeth. “I don’t want to see or hear from you, Whelk, you understand?” His voice warbles so badly you can barely hear him, but he makes absolutely sure there’s no confusion in his head. He spells it all out for you, loud and clear. _Betrayed, get out, used, get out, heartbroken, get out, murderer, get out_ —

You can hear Ronan stirring from the other room. As much as you want to stay, you know you don’t want to still be here when he comes in.

You throw one last rueful look at Gansey before you fade out. “I’m sorry,” you whisper, just for him, and you watch on helplessly as he bursts into tears.

You move on.

You don’t go back.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!!!!!
> 
> come harass me over at [tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/) if you wanna lmao


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